Charles Bergman

Charles Bergman: professor of English at Pacific Lutheran University. He has written articles for Audubon, Smithsonian, National Wildlife, and National Geographic.

I have a fantasy: I imagine myself sitting in my living room, on my sofa. Outside my house&endash;outside our house&endash;animals are gathering. Lost animals, endangered animals. Peering in the windows, with strange expressions on their gaunt faces. Murmuring indistinctly of Something Else. Murmuring in wild echoes. Wild Echoes, 1990.

Objectivity, even rigorously applied, does not redeem us from the imposition of a point of view on nature. Ibid.

. . . there is as little 5 to 10 percent of the original old-growth forest left in the Pacific Northwest, with plans for cutting more. The spotted owl depends upon these huge trees&endash; it feeds on the flying squirrels that live in the old growth, and it nests in the cavities that form in the dying trees. Ibid.

In the silence of the right whale, there is a quieter story, a more humble story, less pretentious but closer to home, anchored to where we live. Through Moby Dick, the sperm whale locates us in the grand struggle, in the quest for the future, in the impulse to overcome nature&endash;which is so central to the American experience of its own identity. Ibid.

We have inherited, and created, impoverished seas. The spouting is more sporadic, gone totally from some areas of the oceans, and the whales that remain are mere relics of the swarms our ancestors wrote of with such awe. Ibid.

The body connects us to nature and gives us life, but it is also external to us, always limited and known only by its surfaces, Ibid.

Built into the question "Why save endangered species? is all the arrogance of centuries of Western domination over nature. Ibid.

As of May 1988, there were 495 U. S. species or subspecies either threatened or endangered on the federal list (377 endangered; 118 threatened). Ibid.

Endangered species have become part of our national conscience: They remind us that our lives and our pleasures are often purchased at the animals' expense, an invasion of their territory. Ibid.

There are about 400 Ivory-billed woodpecker skins in museums around the country. As the bird grew rare at the beginning of this century, scientific collecting actually contributed to its extinction. Ibid.

We are living in an age of loss&endash;more loss, even, than occurred in the Pleistocene. I want only to see the truth about life in our times. I'm not interested in making sure I feel good about myself, and I don't think that focusing on loss is simply negative thinking. It is honesty&endash;about life and about ourselves. Ibid.